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Author/poet breaks down American Indian stereotypes

Sunday, July 06, 2003

By John Freeman

In the 1965 movie "Ten Little Indians," 10 strangers are lured to a fabulous dinner party, over the course of which each one is murdered by their host for crimes they are perceived to have committed.

	"Ten Little Indians" By Sherman Alexie Atlantic Monthly Press ($24)

Things go much better for the cast of Sherman Alexie's latest book, a story collection of the same title. In contrast to the film, this production actually features some Indians and none of them wind up dead.

On the other hand, the book does share one crucial aspect with this film (and the Agatha Christie novel): All its characters have committed petty crimes of passion, greed and longing. Alexie shows how these emotional criminals tack toward atonement.

Unlike collections grouped around a theme, "Ten Little Indians" runs the gamut of human emotion, from grief to envy, rage to shame, conjuring a cast of American Indians so rich and vibrant that it makes the old nursery rhyme seem not just puerile, but racist.

As in his 2000 book, "The Toughest Little Indian in the World," Alexie chips away at stereotypes by presenting a range of characters, none of whom live on a reservation or drink themselves silly. Instead, he writes of American Indians who are successful urban professionals yet alienated both from the mainstream and their roots.

As a result, many of them have to reach backward to access the part of their roots that feels particularly "Indian." In "Search Engine," a 19-year-old Indian woman studying poetry at the University of Washington brings home volumes by W.H. Auden and an unknown Indian poet. While the Auden poems are technically superior, it is this unknown poet, a Spokane like her, who moves this woman. So, with a credit card and her own tenacity, she tracks the man down, hoping to find a mentor. Instead, she finds grave disappointment.

Like this woman, the narrator who reminisces in "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above" is caught between the white and Indian worlds. Though born of Indian parents, he was surrounded by whites growing up, thanks to his gadfly mother, who spent her days tending to the tender self-esteem of white women who fetishized her background.

An accomplished mimic, Alexie instills his narrator's voice with a mixture of affection, rage and regret that is gut-wrenching. "My mother and I have loved and failed each other," he concludes, "and we keep on loving and failing each other, and one of us will eventually bury the other, and the survivor will burn down the church with grief's hungry fire."

Alexie, who grew up on a Spokane reservation until he began attending a white high school, knows well the pain of being between two cultures yet belonging to neither of them. Most often, he deals with such emotions by lambasting them with humor. Pondering her unlikely success in academe, the heroine of "Search Engine" thinks college "was an extreme sport for an Indian woman. Maybe ESPN2 should send a camera crew to cover her academic career."

Indeed, humor has been a cornerstone of Alexie's delivery ever since he made his literary debut in 1992 with not one, but two books: "The Business of Family Dancing," which Alexie recently made into a movie, and a poetry collection. Since then, the prolific author has published two novels, three story collections, seven volumes of poetry and an additional screenplay, and started a fledgling career as a stand-up comic.

That Alexie writes not just well but astonishingly well at this rate makes one wonder if he's not some sort of Indian Charles Dickens, walking the streets of Seattle, where he lives with his family, sleeping little and listening to voices that come to him in the dark. This book captures a few of those voices. Listen carefully. They've got stories to tell.

John Freeman is a writer in New York.